About

When things were going badly I headed back to Germany in an attempt to hold together the film's investors. They asked me if I was going to continue. "Do you really have the strength and will?" I said, "How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams. I live my life or I end my life with 'Fitzcarraldo'." - Werner Herzog

With a production that has become even more legendary than the film itself, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo remains the director's most spectacular cinematic achievement.

When Brian Sweeney 'Fitzcarraldo' Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) decides to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle, he must first transport a 320 ton ship over a Peruvian mountain to access the lucrative rubber trees needed to fund it. Herzog famously refused to fake this endeavour with props and replicas; instead he and his crew actually hauled a full steamship over a mountain in the heart of the South American jungle.

Fitzcarraldo is an audacious epic of a scale that few filmmakers have ever achieved. In matching his lead character's obsessive quest on screen with his own behind the camera, Herzog has produced a titanic piece of cinema startling and rousing in equal measure.